Agency, sexuality and law - globalising
economies, localising cultures, politicising
states
A research workshop co-organised by the Tata Institute
of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and the Centre for
Law, Gender and Sexuality, UK
11-13th December 2007
@ International Conference Centre, Goa, India
Recent debates over dance bars in Mumbai and lap
dance clubs in the UK have marked out a contested
terrain over women’s ‘choices’in
sexual, economic, religious, legal and cultural
terms. These debates provide an opportunity
to consider afresh the concept of agency –as
some kind of capacity to act –and its role
in contemporary feminist thinking. If all
choices are always situated, how do we acknowledge
the significance of struggles to earn, to desire
and to support freely, without denying that some
choices are more possible and privileged than others. There
is a need to complicate and think across the oppositions
between coercion and freedom, choice and commodification,
culture and economy that have polarised our analytical
frameworks and limited our ability to find new
critical approaches. Women’s movements, lesbian
and gay activists and anti-globalisation campaigners
of all kinds have also struggled collectively to
carve out alternative spaces and modes of regulation. How
do we harness that urge to shift the terrain without
under-estimating the impact of institutional systems
on people’s lives? Thinking about these
individual and collective efforts is also related
to the general political and intellectual crisis
over the perceived impossibility of affecting current
global economic, cultural and militarised trends. This
workshop seeks to provide a space for investigating
how culture, religion, media, kinship, economies,
legalities and polities frustrate, mediate or enable
the possibility of acting as sexual subjects at
this moment in global history.
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For more information click on the links:
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Questions for consideration (non-exhaustive)
In what ways are women or gendered persons - bar
girls, veil wearers etc. - currently being constructed
and constructing themselves as bearers of culture?
Do new credit or consumer practices provide an
opportunity to harness collective financial agency
on sexual and gendered terrain?
How are kinship norms and reproductive practices
being constituted through globalising processes?
and having an impact on freedom?
In what ways are morals, markets and conflicts
currently impacting on public expression and censoring
practices? and affecting the relationship between
religion, culture, class and sexuality as possible
constituents of agency?
How is access to urban spaces gendered and sexualised?
and how is such access affected by changes in migration
and mobility patterns?
What kinds of sexual and reproductive choices
are becoming more or less publicly acceptable and
what does this say about changes in public/private
relations?
How are globalising processes affecting women’s
participation in the labour market and impacting
on gendered work practices?
What do practices of resistance and utopia have
to offer our thinking about agency?
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Background reading for Agency, Sexuality and Law colloquium, Goa, 11-13 Dec 07
Recommended
Alvarez, Sonia. 1999. Advocating Feminism: The Latin American Feminist Ngo "Boom". International Feminist Journal of Politics 1, no. 2: 181-209.
Gibson-Graham, J.K., ‘Affects and Emotions for Post-Capitalist Politics’ in A Post-Capitalist Politics (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2006) pp.1-23.
John, Mary, E. & Nair, Janaki, ‘Introduction: A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India’ in A Question of Silence: The Sexual Economies of Modern India (Kali for Women: New Delhi, 2000) pp. 1-52.
Jones de Almeida, Adoja Florencia., ‘Radical Social Change’ (Ed) Incite! Women of Colour in The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex. (South End Press: Massachusetts, 2007) pp.185-195.
Kapur, Ratna, “New Cosmologies: Mapping the Postcolonial Feminist Legal Project”, Chapter 2 of Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism (London: Glass House Press, 2005)
Lovell, T ‘Thinking Feminism With and Against Bourdieu’ (2000) Feminist Theory 1:1, pp.11-32.
Mahmood, S., ‘Agency, Gender and Embodiment’ in Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist subject. (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2005) pp. 153-188.
McNay, L., ‘Gender, Subjectification and Agency: Introductory Remarks’ in Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory (Polity Press, 2000) pp.1-30.
Mitra, R., ‘Living a Body Myth, Performing a Body Reality: reclaiming the Corporeality and Sexuality of an Indian female Dancer’ (2006) Feminist Review 84 pp.67-83.
Further reading
Bourdieu, P., ‘Structures, Habitus, Practices’ in The Logic of Practice (Trans) Richard Nice. (Polity Press: Oxford, 1995) pp52-65
Butler, J., ‘Implicit Censorship and Discursive Agency’ in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge: London) pp.127-163.
Giddens, A., ‘Elements of a Theory of Structuration’ in The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration ((University of California Press: Berkeley) pp.1-40.
Hoy, D., ‘Bourdieu: “Agents not Subjects” in Critical Resistance: From Post-structuralism to Post-Critique (MIT Press: Massachusetts, 2004) pp.101-149.
Hennessy, R., ‘Identity Need and the Making of Revolutionary Love’ in Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (Routledge: London, 2000) pp 203-233
Klotz, M’, ‘Alienation, Labour and Sexuality in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts’ (2006) Rethinking Marxism 18:3 pp 405-413.
Krishnadas, J., ‘Identities in Reconstruction: From Rights of Recognition to Reflection in Post-Disaster Reconstruction Processes’, (2007) Feminist Legal Studies 15:2 pp137-165
Moi, T., ‘Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture’ (1991) New Literary History 22:4 pp. 1017-1049.
Motha, S., ‘Veiled Women and the Affect of Religion in Democracy’, (2007) Journal of Law and Society 34:1 pp. 139-162
Schleuter, J., ‘Beyond Reform: Agency after Theory’ (2007) Feminist Theory 8 pp315-332.
